Critics Jump At Chance To Exploit Clintons

March 20, 1994|By CHARLES V. ZEHREN Newsday

WASHINGTON — In a speech at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Boston last week, President Clinton, showing the strain from relentless Republican attacks over Whitewater, angrily denounced his critics as "committed to the politics of personal destruction."

In an interview several days before that, Hillary Rodham Clinton went further, intimating a conspiracy.

"This is a well-organized and well-financed attempt to undermine my husband and by extension, myself, by people who have a different political agenda or have another personal and financial reason for attacking us," she said.

In the case of Whitewater, the personal is political. Although offering no evidence of an organized effort to destroy the Clintons, Democrats and Republicans said last week that longtime Clinton critics, loosely networked, are exploiting Whitewater.

Republican Senate Minority leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., who has presidential aspirations, has jumped on the Whitewater issue. Conservative House Republicans, with an eye on the November elections, take the floor nearly every day to express outrage over Whitewater.

And longtime Clinton detractors, such as Floyd Brown, champion of the alleged Clinton-Gennifer Flowers tapes during the 1992 campaign, are distributing information to the media and Capitol Hill that is embarrassing to the president.

Republicans seem to be having a field day taking the White House off its game. And with last week's Senate promise of congressional hearings into the Arkansas land venture and the Clintons' financial dealings connected to it, and the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Fiske, Whitewater has taken on a political life of its own.

"The president was getting very strong, and [Whitewater) fell into the Republicans' lap," said former Democratic Party Chairman John White. "And now [the Republicans) are doing what any opposition party would do, just pressing as hard as they can and hoping that someone in the administration will make some serious mistakes. It's part of political life."

"The Republicans in Congress are so mortified that this president is succeeding, that his agenda and his policies are triumphant, that they say, `We've got to throw a roadblock in the way,'" said James Carville, political field general in Clinton's 1992 campaign. "That's all this is. It's pure politics."